Welcome everyone to the Stack the Week experiment for June 8 through June 12. It is available here in text and audio and available in your podcast player. Thank you for those who have reviewed it on Apple Podcasts
Thank you to Annie Cohen and Laura Doan for help preparing this delicious offering.
Declarations that the war is over aren’t over. Inflation isn’t over either. Xi shows even autocrats can be good neighbors. A semitrailer of bourbon vanishes in daylight. Epstein reaches the Situation Room. Ukraine outlasts the Great War. The cost of kicking it on the South Lawn, and solar power passes coal. The bears come down the mountain.
Let’s take it day by day.
Monday June 8
Iran and Israel
Last week Donald Trump called Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu crazy and swore at him. It was notable not only that he was swearing at America’s ally, but that so many people in the White House were anxious to tell reporters that this had taken place.
This week started on a similar sour note. The two launched the Iran war together a hundred days ago, boasting of “unprecedented ‘shoulder to shoulder’ cooperation.” Monday they were fighting each other in public — Trump saying Netanyahu doesn’t get a vote on how the war ends, Netanyahu saying in an on camera rebuttal that he does.
The spat was set off by a chain of events that went back a week. On June 3, the U.S. brokered an Israel–Lebanon ceasefire in Washington. The next day Hezbollah rejected it and fired rockets at Israel. Sunday Netanyahu ordered a strike on Hezbollah’s stronghold in southern Beirut. That same day, Iran fired ballistic missiles at northern Israel in support of Hezbollah — the first Iranian fire since the April 8 ceasefire.
Enter Trump. On Sunday, he tried to stop Israel’s retaliation for the Iranian attack. He told Fox News he’d tell Netanyahu not to hit back, and urged Iran to the table: “You’ve shot your missiles, that’s enough. Get back to the table and make a deal.” He also told Fox he hadn’t known about Israel’s Beirut strikes and was angry about them.
He then told Axios he would call Netanyahu “right now and tell him not to strike back,” and that the U.S. is “very close to a final deal with Iran… I don’t want it to blow up because of what is happening now.”
In a phone interview with the Financial Times the same night — referring to Netanyahu’s say over any U.S.-Iran deal — Trump said: “He won’t have any choice. I call the shots. I call all the shots. He doesn’t call the shots.”
At this point you need to evaluate whether people who say they call the shots really call the shots.
Remember a few weeks ago when I said this entire war is taking place in real time and in public? I’m sticking to that.
Israel ignored the U.S. president and approved its biggest wave of strikes on Iran since April at around 4:30 p.m. Sunday. Trump called Netanyahu shortly after and told him to halt it — Trump’s second call to Netanyahu in under 24 hours. Israel then struck Iran anyway. Trump posted on Truth Social that both sides should stop “immediately.”
Netanyahu waited nearly a day, then posted a two-minute prerecorded video: “Israel has every right to self-defense, and we will exercise that right whenever necessary” — said “with appreciation and respect… to my friend President Trump.”
Netanyahu is reading the battlefield and domestic politics. He’s trailing in the polls with a hard re-election ahead. A New York Times analysis suggests striking Hezbollah let him show his base he’d stand up to Trump, who’d just scolded him over Beirut. But the Times of Israel reports Netanyahu actually resisted far-right pressure to defy Trump on the Iran strikes — “Why should we pick a fight with him?”
Hold this in your brain too. It could be all theater. The Financial Times separately reported Trump knew Israel’s plans all along — good cop talks, bad cop strikes, by design. A former official: if Israel does the dirty work the U.S. wants done, Trump’s “happy with that.” We’ve heard that before in this war. The U.S. let Israel kill all the Iranian leaders at the start of the war. Let is a funny word in that context because the U.S. lives with the consequences.
Weaponization fund not dead
When we ended Stack the Week last week, Anne correctly asked whether the fund was dead or not. I couldn’t give her a good answer. First, because it was unclear: the acting attorney general said the weaponization fund was dead, but since Todd Blanche has been actively carrying out the president’s wishes against the norms of the office and the legal profession, a discerning listener could be suspicious. And the president’s answer last week to Kaitlan Collins’ basic question about whether the fund was dead betrayed such irritation that it lined up with what we know: when the president is angry in public, he’s putting pressure on his aides to give him what he wants. I hadn’t conveyed that full picture.
Sunday the picture got more color. Trump sat for an interview with NBC’s “Meet the Press,” and when Kristen Welker asked the same question—was he backing off the fund completely, as Blanche had said, or looking for another way to revive it—he didn’t answer it. He defended it. People had been destroyed by what he called a fake weaponization of government, he said; lives ruined, jobs and families lost, suicides. “If it was up to me, I’d pay them the kind of money that they deserve.” He called the fund a great idea, said other Republicans agreed, and allowed only that approval was someone else’s job: if it passes, great; if not, he’d be disappointed.
So Blanche’s “dead” and the president’s “great idea” are not the same position.
Then Welker asked whether anyone who attacked police on January 6th should get taxpayer money. Trump wouldn’t rule it out—he said he’d have to see it, then pivoted to the claim that 97 percent of those people were set up by dirty cops and a crooked FBI. Welker noted there’s no evidence the FBI ushered rioters inside or any of the other claims the president made.
Which, I hate to be gauche, means that the president who raises his hand to protect the Constitution is lying with the wide sweep of his hand in order to pretend that people who tried to undermine that Constitution through force on his behalf had been tricked into it by the FBI which is in the executive branch he leads.
I belabor this because if, in the middle of a tennis match, one of the players started eating the tennis balls, it would be worth noting. Is that analogy apt? It doesn’t track, but it might have caused you to pay attention to a development that might just seem like the way things go, given all that this president has done, so if I knocked you out of complacency then it did a useful journalistic thing, which is to put an event into context when the very idea of context is under assault.
Now back to that Meet the Press interview. It went the way these things go. Trump called the 2020 election and last week’s California primary rigged—Welker said there was no evidence—and Trump provided none, attacked NBC, unclipped his microphone, and walked off. “Let’s call it quits because I’ve had enough.”
The Ring of Fire
The earth’s surface is a cracked eggshell — a dozen rigid pieces sliding slowly on hot rock underneath. All the action — earthquakes and volcanoes — happens at the cracks. It feels like the continental coastlines should line up with these cracks, but they usually don’t. The Atlantic seafloor and the Americas sit on the same piece, moving together like two cars side by side at 65 — no collision, nothing to rupture.
The Pacific seafloor is the exception: its own separate plate, ringed by cracks that run exactly at the coastline. All the way around the edge, the Pacific plate is ramming into the plates carrying Japan, Alaska, California, Chile, Indonesia. And because ocean crust is denser than continental crust, the seafloor loses every one of those collisions: it bends and dives underneath the continent, like one car getting forced under another in a head-on crash. The plates stick, strain builds for decades, then slips all at once. Draw a line connecting every place this happens around the rim of the Pacific and you get a 25,000-mile horseshoe called not the horseshoe of fire but the ring of fire. This is not Johnny Cash’s fault. Nine of every ten earthquakes on Earth happen along it, and three of every four active volcanoes sit on it.
The Philippines and its 7,000 islands sit on that horseshoe and on Monday were hit by a magnitude 7.8 earthquake offshore, at 7:37 a.m. — the hour children were arriving for the first day of school after summer break, fresh uniforms, waiting for the flag raising that starts the day. At least 35 people are dead and about a dozen still missing, with more than 200 injured, most of them in buildings that came down. In Glan, the shaking brought a mountainside down on the houses at its foot, killing 13 people at once. A meter-high tsunami came ashore.
Ebola spread
The Ebola outbreak could be the worst ever. And we’ll get to the mayhem in a second, but since we’re not in the business of freaking you out until you’re scratching at the liquor cabinet with an allen wrench to break the lock, there is some moderation in order. Some experts believe the strain of Ebola circulating might have a slightly lower mortality rate than other common variants. So far 12 patients have recovered from their Ebola cases. And the outbreak, of the Bundibugyo species of Ebola, has an estimated case-fatality rate of 17.4% so far according to the WHO—compared to an average of 50% during past outbreaks. The 2014-2016 outbreak was the worst in recorded history, with more than 28,000 reported cases and about 11,300 deaths. Right now there are over 515 cases and 100 deaths.
Okay, but here’s the problem. The doctors fighting it are spooked by the speed. Dr. Alan Gonzalez of Doctors Without Borders said in a statement Monday: “Never before has an Ebola outbreak recorded so many cases so soon after its declaration.” Some of that jump is just better testing, which is the good kind of bad news. The bad kind is the open question underneath it: are exposed people staying home? That’s the whole game in stopping Ebola, and the numbers aren’t reassuring. Health workers are tracing the contacts of only about 40 percent of confirmed cases in Ituri, NPR reports, and dozens of people have walked out of treatment centers and gone back to their communities.
AI job cuts
The line is blurring between genuine disruption in corporate America and the theatrical need to name an outside force as a pretext for firings.
On one hand, the traditional entry-level ladder in finance and tech is being systematically dismantled; the massive “human assembly line” of junior analysts and developers who once spent their nights formatting spreadsheets and fixing basic code is being replaced by automation, forcing college graduates to compete for a radically smaller pool of highly specialized AI roles.
On paper, it looks like a textbook example of creative destruction. One job category dies, a more productive one takes its place, and the economy moves forward. In a vacuum, there’s nothing wrong with that.
But AI isn’t trading old jobs for new ones at the same rate—companies are eliminating three entry-level positions and only hiring one specialized tech worker to replace them. This creates a giant “judgment gap,” because if young graduates only learn how to code the AI rather than learning the actual business from the ground up, there won’t be anyone trained to step into senior leadership roles a decade from now.
U.S. employers announced just over 97,000 job cuts in May 2026, according to a report released last Thursday by outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. According to the report, employers cited AI as the primary reason for almost 40% of May’s announced job cuts, up from 7% in January, 10% in February, 25% in March and 26% in April.
On the other hand, the term “artificial intelligence” has become an incredibly potent shield for management teams, argues the New York Times. Because Wall Street instantly rewards any company that mentions automation and margin efficiency, executives are eagerly using AI as a convenient smoke screen to sweep away old hiring mistakes, mask lost market share, and fatten their profit margins without enduring the typical investor backlash that accompanies a standard corporate slowdown.
So what we don’t know is whether the move to AI is a smart pivot or whether AI is being used to pass off a stumble as a pivot.
11,000 bottles of bourbon
11,000 bottles of bourbon on the wall, eleven thousand bottles of bourbon, take 11,000 down and drive away in a semitrailer, no bottles of bourbon on the wall.
This is what happened in Philadelphia, according to the New York Times. A semitrailer driver impersonating a legitimate employee got away with 18 pallets of Noble Oak bourbon, containing 10,800 bottles in a “coordinated cargo theft operation carried out in broad daylight,” officials announced. The haul from the warehouse was worth about $500,000.
Losses attributed to cargo thefts nationwide jumped to about $725 million in 2025, a 60 percent increase from 2024, according to CargoNet, a business focused on theft prevention and recovery for the insurance industry.
Why is this happening?
Original sin, obviously, but the modern surge boils down to a mix of basic economics, clever hacking, and the nature of the goods themselves.
First, think about the inventory. Thieves have realized that stealing electronics like iPhones or laptops is a bad business model today—they have unique serial numbers, GPS trackers, and can be remotely locked the moment they go missing. Food and alcohol are the exact opposite. Fruit, frozen chicken, and premium bourbon don’t carry unique digital serial numbers or barcodes that can be tracked by police. Once those 10,800 bottles of bourbon leave the warehouse, they look exactly like every other bottle of Noble Oak on the market. Food and drinks can be offloaded to shady distributors or small grocery stores incredibly quickly, and it’s largely untraceable.
Second, the legal system actually works in the thieves’ favor here due to safety laws. If the police do manage to recover a stolen shipment of frozen beef or seafood a few days later, the “cold chain” has been broken. Because authorities can’t prove the food was kept at the right temperature, the insurance company mandates the entire shipment be destroyed. The evidence literally gets thrown away.
Finally, the method of stealing has gone digital. Thieves aren’t cutting fences in the middle of the night anymore; they are using “strategic theft.” Criminal syndicates use phishing scams to hack into shipping networks and load boards. They find out exactly what high-value items are being shipped and when. Then, they create fake identities or buy up small, real trucking companies with clean records, show up at the warehouse in broad daylight with fake paperwork, and just drive away with the goods before the real driver even shows up.
That’s how you get the massive wave of holiday heists we saw in December alone:
Beef in Texas: valued at $161,000
Chocolate in New Jersey: valued at $150,000
Blueberries and kiwis in New Jersey: valued at $160,000
Processed lobster meat: valued at $400,000, which completely disappeared after being picked up from a warehouse in Taunton, Mass.
Tuesday June 9
Apache down
At 3:30 a.m. Tuesday, an Army Apache gunship went down off the coast of Oman.
This brought the president into the mire. While CENTCOM spent Tuesday morning doing the typical, cautious military dance—issuing dry statements that the crash was “under investigation” and refusing to rule out mechanical failure—Trump completely bypassed them. At about 12:30 he accused Iranians of shooting down the chopper and declared the U.S. “must, of necessity, respond.” Within hours, CENTCOM launched retaliatory air strikes lighting up Iran’s southern coast.
The split-screen from Monday made the Israeli Prime Minister look isolated and defiant. But by Tuesday night, Iran’s aggression forced the U.S. to do exactly what Netanyahu had wanted all along: engage Iran directly. The narrative that Trump was “calling all the shots” to wind down the war collapsed the moment an Iranian drone collided with an American helicopter.
Airline profits crash from war
The 102-day-old war has changed the economics of flight. Some catch-up first: in the early fuel freak-out, carriers like Ryanair predicted they’d run out by the end of May. That didn’t happen. The Strait of Hormuz carried about 400,000 barrels of jet fuel a day before Iran’s blockade, and Europe has replaced much of that lost supply with cargoes from the U.S., Nigeria, and India — fuel now traveling record distances to reach the planes that burn it. So the industry isn’t grounded by a lack of fuel. It’s being re-sorted by who locked in their fuel prices before the war and who didn’t. Airlines can buy fuel years in advance at a fixed price — a hedge, in industry terms — which costs extra when oil is cheap but means that when war sends prices soaring, you keep paying the old price. Ryanair and Europe’s legacy carriers hedged. They’re passing the smaller blow to passengers anyway: the average domestic round-trip hit $358 this spring, up 18 percent year-over-year, per Kayak booking data analyzed by Deutsche Bank, and Delta, American, United, JetBlue, and Alaska have all raised checked-bag fees — revenue their executives concede will outlast the war. The airlines that skipped the insurance are paying the war price for every gallon. United, largely unhedged, has seen its average advance-purchase fares spike more than 90 percent. Spirit, unhedged and already broke, is being wiped off the board.
This week the International Air Transport Association, the industry’s top global trade group, projected that airline profits will fall by half in 2026. Jet fuel was up 62.4 percent year-over-year for the week ending June 5, per IATA. U.S. airlines spent more than $6 billion on fuel in April — 78 percent more than a year earlier, while burning slightly less of it, according to Bureau of Transportation Statistics data released Monday.
Platner Advances
Unsurprisingly, Graham Platner took the Democratic nomination in Maine — roughly 78 percent to 17 for governor Janet Mills, who suspended her campaign in April but stayed on the ballot. If Democrats are going to win back the Senate, they almost certainly have to beat the Republican incumbent Susan Collins. Platner is now the instrument.
The record being weighed: unearthed social media posts with offensive comments about women and rape; a tattoo resembling a Nazi symbol, since covered with new ink; reports that he sent sexually explicit messages to several women early in his marriage, and accusations from ex-girlfriends of toxic behavior.
His candidacy is a test of what Democrats think about men who mistreat women in word and deed. Al Franken was run out of the party over one photo and eight women’s accusations of unwanted touching. Has Platner done worse? Franken’s resignation cost the party nothing — Minnesota’s Democratic governor would name his replacement. Tolerating Platner is the price of the seat that may decide the Senate. Which suggests the standard was never independent of what it cost.
Tuesday night. Democratic leader Chuck Schumer, who had initially backed Mills, declared in a joint statement with New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (who had helped run out Franken): “In November, Maine voters will elect Graham Platner, and we will win a Senate majority.” No agonizing, no asterisk.
Platner is not just key to winning back the Senate, he is also an avatar of a populist movement on the left that is the energetic center of the Democratic Party. Has the political process in both parties reached a new accommodation: that the problems Americans face are so in need of remedy that imperfect lawmakers, perfectly aligned on core issues, are acceptable — and at what point does the accommodation stop being new and start being the standard?
In South Carolina, Congresswoman Nancy Mace lost her bid for governor, finishing behind the Trump-backed Lt. Gov. who advanced to a runoff. After years of trying on and off to align herself with Trump, Mace aggressively pushed for release of the Epstein files — and lost the president’s favor. Sen. Lindsey Graham, never beloved by the MAGA base but armed with Trump’s endorsement and millions in spending, held off challenger Mark Lynch to make the November ballot.
Artemis III crew announced
NASA officially named the four-person crew for its mid-2027 Artemis III mission on Tuesday. They won’t go to the moon, but perform a high-risk tech rehearsal in low-Earth orbit. For roughly two weeks, the crew will test rendezvous and docking maneuvers with mock-up or operational lunar landers built by private contractors. Troubleshooting will prepare for the same activity in 2028 a quarter-million miles away on the moon mission.
That timeline is looking shaky. To get astronauts from orbit down to the lunar dust, NASA is entirely dependent on private vehicles from SpaceX (Starship) and Blue Origin (Blue Moon). Neither vehicle has finished development, nor are the heavy-lift rockets meant to haul them into space anywhere near ready. SpaceX’s Starship has repeatedly failed during critical test flights, and Blue Origin is still recovering from a catastrophic New Glenn rocket explosion on May 28 that severely damaged the company’s only launchpad but was good news for the writers searching for good metaphors of failure without using AI. “Launchpad disaster” has now been refreshed in the lexicon.
China hopes to land astronauts on the moon by 2030 and the race is on, not just to plant a flag on the lunar south pole but also to establish the baseline legal, commercial, and economic framework for the next century of space development.
The look of the crew drew comment. The roster includes an African American, the first astronaut of Salvadoran descent, and a famed Italian test pilot who survived a twenty thirteen spacewalk mishap when his helmet rapidly filled with leaking cooling water. Yet for all of its international and ethnic diversity, the crew is entirely male.
NASA previously had a prominent, explicit pledge on its website committing to land “the first woman and the first person of color” on the lunar surface. That language was quietly expunged weeks after the administration initiated a federal crackdown on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives early last year.
Xi goes to Pyongyang
Monday in Pyongyang, children hopped and waved balloons, a military band played two national anthems, a 21-gun salute boomed across Kim Il-sung Square, and buildings draped in Chinese and North Korean flags carried banners reading: “We warmly welcome Comrade Xi Jinping.” The Chinese president had come to North Korea for the first time in seven years. Kim Jong Un called him “the greatest state guest,” per North Korean state media, and declared friendship with China “the most important top-priority strategic work.”
Over two days the leaders planted a fir tree, toured a Workers’ Party cadre school where the party’s managerial staff are trained, and laid tribute at the tower honoring Chinese soldiers who died fighting alongside the North in the Korean War.
When Xi last visited in 2019, he said Beijing would play a constructive role in denuclearizing the Korean Peninsula. Once a topic that Donald Trump cared about. After his 2018 Singapore summit, Trump famously declared on Twitter that there was “no longer a Nuclear Threat from North Korea” and told Americans to “sleep well tonight.” His Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, swatted away skepticism over the vague deal, telling reporters the U.S. fully expected the regime to take “major” disarmament steps within two years.
President Trump’s claims about ending the North Korean nuclear program didn’t come to pass. Probably worth keeping in mind when evaluating claims about the nature of the Iranian nuclear program.
This time the word nuclear appeared nowhere — not in the Chinese readout, not in the North Korean one. The week before Xi landed, Kim unveiled a new plant for producing nuclear material and ordered his arsenal expanded “at an exponential rate.” His sister, Kim Yo Jong, called American denuclearization hopes an “anachronistic dream” — and called “false” the White House claim that Xi and Trump had affirmed the goal at their Beijing summit last month.
So as this meeting wrapped up on Tuesday, we wondered, what’s the relationship between the two countries anyway? That could be a great transition or the best I could do in a rush. There is no secondary betting market so your wagers on which it is will have to be for bottlecaps or something.
North Korea is China’s only treaty partner, but Kim has spent recent years playing autocrat’s footsie with Moscow — more than 10,000 North Korean troops sent to fight in Ukraine, a mutual defense pact signed with Putin in 2024. A new relationship with Moscow that can provide cash for the starving North Korea allows its leader to go around China possibly and develop its nuclear program.
Xi doesn’t really want a nuclear armed neighbor who’s not on deeply friendly terms, so he came bearing what China can offer that Russia can’t: reopened border crossings, resumed flights and trains, trade back at pre-pandemic levels, and — analysts told the AP — likely rice, fertilizer, and Chinese tour groups. Kim paid in the currency Beijing values most, publicly endorsing the One China principle on Taiwan.
So the trade, as Reuters’ analysts read it: Kim backs China’s claim to Taiwan; China stops mentioning Kim’s bombs. “Beijing has very clearly moved on from that issue and now tacitly accepts North Korea as a nuclear state,” said Jeremy Chan of the Eurasia Group. Those bombs are accumulating. South Korean President Lee Jae Myung told reporters Monday that the North now produces enough nuclear material annually for 10 to 20 weapons and is close to perfecting an intercontinental ballistic missile.
Social Security shortfall
Social Security is not a savings account with your name on it. The money taken out of your paycheck this Friday goes almost immediately back out the door as a check to somebody’s grandmother. Today’s workers pay today’s retirees. Last year, 185 million Americans paid in and 70 million collected — retirees, disabled workers, and the survivors of workers who died. It’s a bucket brigade, not a piggy bank.
For decades the brigade collected more water than the fire needed, because the baby boomers — the biggest generation in American history — were all working and paying in at once. But here’s the part most people don’t know: the surplus was never set aside as cash. By law, Social Security lent every extra dollar to the U.S. Treasury, which spent it on everything else — wars, highways, tax cuts — and handed back IOUs in the form of special Treasury bonds. Those bonds are legally binding and earn interest. But they’re a claim on future tax dollars, not money in a drawer. The trust fund is less a piggy bank than a loan Social Security made to the rest of the government, which is now due.
The repayment began in stages. In 2010, the boomers’ retirements started outrunning their replacements’ paychecks: for the first time in a generation, payroll taxes alone no longer covered the benefits going out. But for a decade, the interest paid by the federal government on those Treasury IOUs covered the gap. Then in 2021 even the interest wasn’t enough, and the system started cashing in the bonds themselves. Every redeemed bond is money the Treasury must now raise — through taxes or fresh borrowing — to pay back what it spent decades ago. Last year the gap was $160 billion.
Remember who owes the money. The same Treasury that must redeem Social Security’s bonds is already running deficits of nearly $2 trillion a year, on top of a national debt approaching $38 trillion. So when Social Security cashes an IOU, the government doesn’t reach into savings — it has none. It borrows the money from new lenders to repay the old loan, at today’s interest rates, while paying interest on everything it already owes.
Now the news: The government’s trustees reported this month that the bonds run out in the fourth quarter of 2032 — three months sooner than last year’s projection. When that happens, Social Security does not go bankrupt. Workers keep paying in every Friday; that money still flows straight out. It’s just only enough to cover 78 percent of promised benefits, and the law doesn’t let the system borrow the difference. Checks automatically shrink 22 percent. A $2,000 monthly check becomes $1,560 — for everyone, all at once, no vote required. And the hole keeps deepening: by 2100, incoming taxes would cover only 62 percent.
The biggest reason is the most human one: Americans are having fewer babies than the government’s accountants assumed. The trustees cut their long-run forecast from 1.90 children per woman to 1.75 — and in a bucket brigade, fewer children today means fewer hands passing water in 2055. That single revision did more damage to the long-term math than anything Congress passed. Second, last year’s tax law: some retirees pay income tax on their benefits, and that money cycles back into the fund; the law cut those taxes, so less cycles back.
Third, immigration fell — and immigrants are quietly one of the system’s better deals, since millions pay payroll taxes that some can never legally collect as benefits.
You may have noticed that we started that item not by giving you the news, but a little refresher on social security. Here at Stack the Week we believe some news lands better on prepared ground. The alternative is to tell you the news first, then explain the system, and hope you can fit the news inside the explanation — except by the time you’ve relearned the system, you’ve forgotten the news.
iPhones Interruptus
For twenty years, demographers have hunted whatever has been quietly switching off America’s maternity wards. The fertility rate has fallen every year but two since 2007, hitting another record low in 2025 — 53.1 births per 1,000 women of childbearing age, per federal data released in April, and total births were down to about 3.6 million. For comparison, the fertility rate at the height of the Baby Boom in 1957 was 122.9 births per 1,000 women, and the fertility rate in 2006 was 68.5 births per 1,000 women. The suspect lineup has included the Great Recession, contraception, abortion access, rising female education, and, in one earnest academic effort, the MTV show “16 and Pregnant.” Now two new papers point at the device most readers are holding while they hear this: the fertility rate began falling in 2007, the year the iPhone was born.
The question is how you prove a phone prevents a pregnancy. No ethics board lets you randomly assign teenagers smartphones and count the babies. Economist Caitlin Myers of Middlebury College and her student Ezekiel Hooper found that history had run the experiment for them. From its 2007 launch until February 2011, the iPhone worked only on AT&T’s network, and AT&T’s coverage was spotty — so some American counties got the iPhone era on schedule while otherwise identical counties waited. Births fell in both. But they fell faster where the iPhone was: by that measure, the device caused as much as half of the national fertility decline from 2007 to 2011, with the sharpest drop among 15-to-24-year-olds.
In the second study economists at the University of Cincinnati analyzed 128 countries and found that teenage fertility declines accelerated once smartphones became a mass phenomenon — in Iran and Costa Rica, Guatemala and Turkey, countries that share no health care system, welfare state, abortion law, or religious tradition. “Whatever caused it was something global,” they wrote — “something that arrived in roughly the same form in all of these places at roughly the same time.” Back home, they confirmed it with American data: teen fertility fell fastest in counties with the best broadband and 4G.
As for the mechanism, Myers offers three candidates, in descending order of innocence: young people socializing on their phones instead of in person, and therefore not in the back seats where pregnancies historically began; phones delivering better information about contraception; and phones delivering pornography as a substitute for the real thing.
Booze by the thimble
If you’re enjoying the Stack of the Week with a cocktail this fine Friday we are at a philosophical crossroads. Either plug your ears for about 10 seconds or make sure your cold glass is full up to the collar because you might need it to get through this item. You can pause the machine while you wrestle with this question or the top of the bottle. Okay, here is the item:
People who have even one drink per day face a slightly increased risk of premature death from illness or injury directly attributable to alcohol, researchers found—affecting one in 1,000 people. Two drinks a day—a level long considered safe for men—and that risk rises to one in 25. That’s according to a federally funded study published independently Tuesday in the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs.
The Trump administration chose not to incorporate that information in new dietary guidelines released earlier this year, which suggested limiting alcohol consumption but excluded a specific recommendation of a daily limit, as they had before.
The study was one of two commissioned during the Biden administration to inform those guidelines. The other report concluded the opposite—that moderate drinking was healthier than not drinking at all. Some of its panelists had financial ties to the alcohol industry.
Robert M. Vincent, the former government official who commissioned the study warning of alcohol’s risks, claimed in an editorial accompanying it that he was fired last year because it produced evidence “at odds with commercial interests.” Vincent also says that while serving in the Trump administration he was “asked to kill the study.” He didn’t.
The alcohol industry had sought to keep the study in the icebox since a draft version circulated last year, claiming the research was ideologically driven and flawed.
The industry is losing ground with the American public. Last year, for the first time in over 20 years of surveys, a majority of Americans, 53%, told Gallup that drinking “one or two drinks a day” was bad for one’s health—up from 28% as recently as 2018. But 43% of Americans said they believed moderate daily drinking made no difference on health or was even beneficial. Fewer are drinking at all: 54% of adults say they consume alcohol, the lowest share in nearly 90 years of Gallup polling. But excessive alcohol use is still responsible for the deaths of 178,000 Americans a year according to the latest CDC numbers from 2021, a 29% increase from 2017.
Japanese bear market
A bear walked into downtown Utsunomiya this week — past the shopping district’s security cameras, onto the grounds of a junior high school — and a Japanese city of half a million closed every public elementary and junior high school, indefinitely. Police and the local hunting association patrolled the streets. Officials couldn’t say whether they were hunting one bear or several. On Wednesday came a resolution of sorts: a veterinarian brought down one black bear with two tranquilizer darts.
Japan’s environment ministry counted 238 bear attack victims in 2025, a record, including 13 deaths. The crisis grew bad enough last fall that the government deployed military troops to hard-hit regions and foreign governments issued travel advisories — for Japan, a country whose principal dangers had previously been earthquakes and overwork.
Winter brought a lull…. because….?
….that’s when the nonfiction Dad books are published and bears are voracious readers.
Also, they hibernate in the winter.
They’re up now and don’t bother with light summer pulp reads. Between April and June 2, bears killed three people and attacked 20 more across at least nine prefectures. Last week, a bear injured four people at a steel factory in Fukushima — where, the mayor reported, it was also seen drinking from a tap it may have turned on itself. He called the animal “extremely intelligent,” a compliment no one wanted.
What’s driving bears into the cities is, in part, what’s draining the people out. Japan’s population is aging and shrinking, fastest in exactly the rural towns that once formed a buffer between mountain and metropolis. Fewer residents, fewer farmers, and far fewer hunters — a graying profession few young Japanese are entering — mean the bears, now estimated at 57,800, simply walk through where a town used to be. Climate change supplies the motive: poor harvests of the nuts and berries bears live on send them foraging downhill. Japan spent decades worried about its empty villages. The villages are filling back up, but the villages can’t bear it.
Is he really going to let that stay in the edit? Yes, he thinks it’s charming.
Wednesday June 10
Inflation is up
Inflation was up but it’s more complicated than that.
First, the numbers: U.S. inflation accelerated for a third-straight month in May, to 4.2 percent — up from a 2.4 percent annual rate before the conflict with Iran started in February, and the fastest pace since April 2023. Energy prices drove the bulk of the increase — gasoline alone is up 40.5 percent from a year ago. Strip out energy and food and the “core” index rose 2.9 percent over the year. Core was 3.3 percent when Trump took office, so those prices are rising slower than when he arrived — though core did tick up from April’s 2.8.
Economists look at this reading and conclude that this is as bad as the Iran shock gets. The oil shock has not embedded in the larger economy. That is not a verdict, it’s a guess that war prices stay war prices and don’t become everything prices.
Meanwhile, paychecks keep shrinking in real terms: inflation has outpaced wage gains two months running.
The president responded: “I love the inflation. No, I love it, the numbers were great.” He meant, presumably, that he loved that the number wasn’t worse.
This got a lot of comment, mostly as a political thing. Ooooh, the president said something he wasn’t supposed to say in an election year. Fine. But here at Stack the Week we get fussy about measuring economics through politics. It’s lazy. The job is to figure out what is happening in the economy, who it affects, why it’s happening. If a politician says something, it should be measured against reality. Instead, none of that happens. It’s all vibes. A president says something and that’s compared to polling where people have a different feeling. Okay, but you haven’t told me anything about the actual economy. It’s like covering a baseball game by pointing the camera at the crowd. You learn who’s booing and who’s doing the wave. You never learn the score.
So, are prices going to go down once the war stops? Yes, but how much, we don’t know. To suggest that everything was doing just great before the Iran Waris not so. Inflation before the war was worse than inflation when Donald Trump took over. And inflation and its effect on the American household is not fully measured by the Consumer Price Index, which we’ve been talking about. There are other reasons people feel the pinch.
Household money worries at 4 year high
The Federal Reserve Bank of New York surveys about 1,300 people, each the main earner in a household, and asks two things: how are your finances now, and where are they headed? In May, the answers were the darkest in years.
One in eight households is much worse off than a year ago, by its own accounting. That’s the largest share since the summer of 2022, when inflation hit a four-decade high. Add the people who feel somewhat worse, and nearly half of everyone surveyed says their finances have slipped — the gloomiest reading since January 2023. A year out, more expect things to get worse (36 percent) than better (22.9 percent), the widest gap between worry and hope since October 2022.
People are worried about the basics. They expect rent to rise 7.4 percent over the next year, groceries 5.8 percent, home prices 3.5 percent — rent and groceries both faster than the 4.2 percent headline. This is why, when the president frames inflation as the choice between three dolls or four, as he has, he makes household pain sound like skipping an indulgence rather than losing a necessity. Nobody rents a doll.
When money runs short, people lean on credit — and they expect borrowing to get harder. They’re already bracing to fall behind: the average person now puts the odds of missing a minimum debt payment in the next three months at 12.6 percent. The rise came almost entirely from households earning under $100,000 and people without a college degree — the ones with the least room to absorb a missed paycheck.
None of this matches the jobs reports, which have been strong. So why the fear? Because a job feels safe only when you believe you could find another — and that belief is slipping. The odds people give themselves of landing a new job after a layoff fell to 43.7 percent, down from the 12-month trailing average of 46.8 percent and the lowest since late 2025. The fear of losing the current job rose to 15.1 percent.
Epstein in the Situation Room
There was more Epstein fuss, a word I apply because Epstein is in danger of becoming a fuss donut, a story where there is a lot of noise about it but the core issue gets lost. That’s the hole in the donut analogy.
Here is the core of it: citizens simply want the administration to do what it promised to do, and what the law expects. It is not doing that. Instead, officials are performing immense institutional gymnastics to protect the president’s political fortunes and shield his wealthy, connected associates. In this, the administration’s actions—protecting the comfortable at the expense of the victims—become a dark echo of the underlying crime itself, where a man of vast connection and wealth destroyed the lives of young women while a protective web kept him invisible.
First, what remains hidden. The public and members in both parties want the missing 2.5 million pages. While the Department of Justice declared its production “complete” in early 2026, investigative reports and members of Congress point out that the full government archive exceeds 6 million pages. The remaining, unproduced trove needs to be cleared and published. Specifically, there is an intense demand to see the unredacted context behind the raw, unverified personal allegations against Trump and other elites that the FBI collected over the decades—information that is currently obscured by heavy redactions.
The core accusation here is corrupt obstruction: the abuse of executive power to safeguard Donald Trump’s personal and political reputation. This accusation received fresh fuel this week with a bombshell New York Times report detailing internal West Wing panic. Senior Trump officials were so alarmed by the contents of the files that they held a strategy meeting in the Situation Room—a space legally and historically reserved for national security crises, not partisan damage control. The Times also revealed that the president explicitly ordered the issue “buried,” snapping at anyone who brought it up.
By law and custom, the administration’s sole duty is to disclose the truth and seek justice for the victims. Instead, all executive energy is blowing in the opposite direction—squandered on PR gambits to exonerate the president and political operations to punish the rare Republicans who advocate for transparency. The administration did not treat these files as a matter of public interest or statutory compliance, but as a radioactive public relations disaster to be contained and suppressed by the full apparatus of the federal government.
Iran escalation
The war with Iran escalated sharply on Wednesday, following days of heavy fighting that nearly pulled both nations into full-scale conflict.
U.S. Central Command launched a much heavier second wave of reprisals for the Apache downing on Wednesday, hitting Iranian air defenses, radar networks, drone command units, and targets near Tehran. Simultaneously, U.S. forces disabled a tanker to enforce a maritime oil blockade. Iran retaliated, launching ballistic missiles and drones at U.S. bases in Kuwait, Jordan, and Bahrain. While military damage was limited, the strikes shook energy markets and caused a civilian casualty at a Kuwaiti airport.
On Wednesday, The New York Times indicated U.S. forces used a precision-guided GBU-39 bomb to directly target and destroy two concrete water-storage reservoirs. This severed the drinking water supply for more than 20,000 civilians across ten villages during a historic drought and local temperatures exceeding 100°F. Under Article 54 of the Geneva Conventions, civilian drinking water installations are granted absolute protection; attacking them is strictly prohibited unless they serve a direct military function. Because the reservoirs were isolated in a remote area with no military infrastructure nearby, international lawyers state the likelihood of a targeting error is virtually nonexistent, leaving the Trump administration facing severe accusations of intentionally deploying state terror against a civilian population.
Billionaire Wealth Keeps booming
Sometimes the news is too big for one broadcast. Is this a broadcast? Let’s say it is for the purposes of the previous sentence. The news is too big either because we have busy lives or because the weight of things means you’ve already got big rocks in your cognitive and emotional basket and you can’t take a boulder the size of a VW Bus.
On the other hand, the big currents stirring our world must be attended to so that we understand where we are and, for those interested in trying to change the state of things, know which wheel to put their shoulder to — or, in this case, which cliché to embrace. (Yes, I know I switched from rocks to currents there, but in a world where our reflecting pools are taller than skyscrapers, our boulders and currents are the same).
Why that preamble? We’re always trying to find new ways into stories here at Stack the Week, and this is the way I’ve chosen to talk about the massive wealth inequality tilting our world.
On the one hand, American households feel gloomier and more stretched than at any point in years — see the item above. On the other hand, the combined wealth of the world’s billionaires totals $20.1 trillion.
Why does this matter? A billionaire has the answer. Dario Amodei, the billionaire chief executive of Anthropic, the maker of the chatbot Claude, wrote this year: “We are already at historically unprecedented levels of wealth concentration,” adding that “the thing to worry about is a level of wealth concentration that will break society.”
How would it break society? At some point wealth stops buying things and starts buying rules. Consider DOGE: Elon Musk was handed so much power over the federal government, and used it with so few checks, not because voters chose him but because his fortune put him in the room. And in a system where most congressional seats are safe, the threat that disciplines a legislator isn’t voters in November, it’s the primary — a small, cheap election where a donor’s dollar goes further than a voter’s ballot.
Donald Trump, a wealthy fellow, has increased the power of loyalty-based partisanship in his party, making it more money-centered because primaries are more important. This is just one of the many ways he has concentrated power where the dollars are.
Fifteen years ago, the world’s billionaires collectively had $4.5 trillion. By 2024, that had more than tripled to $14.2 trillion. Now it’s $20.1 trillion — and the latest leap is largely the artificial intelligence boom, which has funneled trillions into a small clutch of tech companies. Watch it happen in real time with SpaceX’s public offering — set to be the biggest in history. The Day 1 valuation targets $1.77 trillion when shares begin trading on Friday. With 42 percent of the stock, Mr. Musk would be an instant trillionaire. Only 21 of the world’s roughly 195 countries produce a trillion dollars of output in a year.
Who collects when markets boom? The top 1 percent of Americans own half of all stock, according to the Federal Reserve. The top 0.1 percent — about 135,000 households — own $13.7 trillion of it. That is nearly double the $7.1 trillion owned by the bottom 90 percent. And tax policy keeps the wheel turning. The 2017 corporate rate cut fattened profits, and companies spent the windfall buying back their own shares — the one use of cash that rewards everyone who decides: it lifts the stock price that is the basis of executive compensation and hands shareholders their gains as paper, untaxed until sold. The richest never sell. They borrow against the shares and let it compound.
Where does this leave us? I could unleash a thousand questions, but this item is already getting long. Look for the questions on the substack tomorrow.
The pope and the high church.
The cathedral effect is the finding that ceiling height shapes the kind of thinking people do. High ceilings prime abstraction — people in tall spaces think more freely, make broader associations, solve problems more creatively. Low ceilings prime confinement and focus — better for detail work, line editing, anything requiring concentration on the concrete.
Pope Leo XIV on Wednesday inaugurated the 566-foot Tower of Jesus Christ, which is the world’s largest church. The intricate sculptural compositions and natural motifs are a stone embodiment of the Bible.
The Pope’s visit took place on the anniversary of the mastermind behind the basilica’s design, the legendary Catalan architect Antoni Gaudí. 100 years ago Gaudi was hit by a tram in a story which is so allegorical it requires treatment in a separate item, which I will post shortly. “Nature is my teacher,” Gaudí once said. “Everything comes from the great book of nature, always open that we must read.”
In November, Lego will be releasing a 12,060-piece version of the basilica for $800, the largest lego set ever made.
The “Paradise Lost” influencer
Influencers in your instagram feed have a lot of suggestions about exercise regimens and self-improvement habits. How about memorizing seven lines of Milton’s Paradise Lost on the exercise bike, then lifting weights while you go over the 14 previous lines you’d studied. At the end, you’ve got rock hard abs and you’re on your way to achieving what John Basinger (pronounced Bay-singer) did using that regimen. He memorized all of “Paradise Lost” — 10,565 lines, more than 60,000 words, Milton’s complete account of the fall of man. He started in 1993, after retiring from teaching.
Basinger, who died recently at age 92, was a man who did interesting things. He walked from New York to San Francisco as a young man. He moved to Kenya on a whim and taught at a rural boys’ school for five years, picking up fluent Swahili. He spent decades writing for and performing with the National Theater of the Deaf — he wasn’t deaf; he just learned sign language and made himself indispensable. The Milton feat became a one-man show and inspired actual memory research, which suggests scientists found him as improbable as everyone else did.
Thursday June 11
Iran: The “Great Settlement”
Wednesday’s fighting turned out to be the climax. Thursday, President Trump announced a “great settlement” reached through Qatari mediators — a draft framework opening a 60-day window for comprehensive nuclear and maritime negotiations. Global markets surged on the news. Whether a 60-day window produces a deal or just a 60-day countdown is the question the markets aren’t pricing. .
Trump’s new DNI
Trump Pultes the Ripcord: After lawmakers revolted over the president’s selection of Bill Pulte as interim Director of National Intelligence — a man with no relevant intelligence experience, known mostly for achieving excellence in using government powers to pursue the president’s perceived enemies — Trump nominated Jay Clayton, the U.S. attorney in Manhattan. Clayton’s résumé includes prosecuting Nicolás Maduro (captured by U.S. forces in January). Clayton’s résumé outside the job: frequent golf with the president at Mar-a-Lago, and a CNBC appearance this week echoing Trump’s California fraud claims.
The reversal came too late to spare a casualty. Congress left Washington Thursday without extending one of the government’s most powerful surveillance authorities, all but assuring it expires Saturday. Democrats — including those pushing for renewal — refused to act until Trump dropped Pulte or named a suitable permanent pick. The lapsing law lets the government collect, without a warrant, the communications of foreigners abroad from U.S. companies like Google and AT&T. A core tool for tracking foreign threats, lost to a staffing dispute.
Ukraine outlasts the Great War
On Thursday the war in Ukraine reached 1,569 days — four years and three months — making it longer than World War I, the war French soldiers called “the last of the last.”
Putin planned on days.
The answer to who is winning has started to move. Some analysts argue the tide is shifting toward Ukraine because of its dominance in drone use. Ukraine’s factories now produce enough of them to launch more than 5,000 strikes a month at targets well behind the front, according to Ukrainian officials.
The defense minister, Mykhailo Fedorov, said strikes beyond 30 miles doubled from April to May.
The targets are the roads and railways — some more than 100 miles back — that carry Russian troops, fuel, and ammunition toward the fight.
Kyiv calls it a “logistics lockdown”: hit the unarmored trucks and trains, and the front starves.
The Times reports it is working, at least until Russia adapts — fuel shortages, snarled troop rotations, less Russian activity at the front line.
The drones themselves measure how the war changed Ukraine: in the first year, nearly all of them ran on Chinese components; by last year that share had fallen to about 38 percent, Ukrainian manufacturers filling the gap, per the Council on Foreign Relations.
Russia still occupies roughly 20 percent of Ukraine, and it gained almost 5,000 square kilometers last year — an area about the size of Delaware. In February, Ukraine took back 78 square miles in five days — the drones again — and has kept gaining through its fifth spring offensive.
Britain’s largest spy agency estimates almost 500,000 Russian soldiers killed since 2022.
Ukraine, by its own count, has lost 55,000.
The cost in money: a single day of full-scale war ran Ukraine an average of $172 million last year, per the head of its general staff — more than $60 billion a year.
Since 2022, the United States has sent about $188 billion in aid and the European Union $197 billion.
The Financial Times reported the Kremlin will overshoot its budget by at least $28 billion this year, even with the Iran war pushing oil above $100 a barrel for the first time since 2022 — a windfall that won’t cover the gap.
Zelensky’s office published a letter last Thursday asking Putin for a face-to-face meeting in a third country, with a date attached. Putin said there was “no point.”
22 Specialists
How many medical specialists does it take to assess a president at a checkup? For Donald Trump: 22, up from 14 last year. The White House won’t say why or name the specialties. After the May exam at Walter Reed, Trump posted: “Everything checked out PERFECTLY.”
UFC in DC
Staging a cage fight on the South Lawn costs at least $60 million, a figure that became public because two Virginia residents sued to stop it. The suit, filed by the Public Integrity Project, says National Park Service rules prohibit sporting events of any kind on the South Lawn, and that the towering arch built over it required an act of Congress and an environmental review. It got neither.
The White House answer is about money, not permission. “UFC is funding and paying for this entire event,” a White House official said in a statement, adding that no taxpayer dollars are involved beyond employees’ normal duties. For scale: a tented White House dinner runs about $1 million, Martin Mongiello, a former White House executive chef who worked under seven administrations, told the BBC. This event costs sixty of those.
Why would a company spend $60 million on a fight it expects to lose $30 million on, even with Ram Trucks, Crypto.com, and Monster Energy as sponsors? Mark Shapiro, president of UFC’s parent company TKO, told Wall Street analysts in February: “We will not profit from the White House event independently.” The South Lawn is an ad. He called it a strategic investment in Paramount+ subscribers and “Super Bowl-like earned media across the globe.”
The venue was the president’s idea. At UFC 309 in November 2024, Trump leaned over to Dana White ,the UFC’s CEO and suggested a White House fight. White told The Hollywood Reporter he assumed Trump meant a room inside. “He’s like, ‘No, we’re gonna do it outside on the South Lawn.’”
Tickets are invite-only. White says Trump holds about 1,200, White has 300, Ari Emanuel, whose company TKO owns the UFC, has 400, and the rest go to members of the military.
When it’s over, UFC will pay $700,000 to put the grass back.
Knicks do well
We all know the real reason you come to Stack the Week is for our scintillating sports coverage. Here’s a recap of game 4 of the NBA finals from Annie Cohen, who doesn’t know the first thing about basketball and didn’t watch the game but has gotten swept up into the Knicks fever taking over New York City and saw the highlights on social media.*
“The Knicks were behind by a lot of points at halftime. They did better in the second half, but with 5 seconds on the clock they were still a point or two behind (I can’t remember exactly) but then a Knicks player shot a basket from far that looked like it was going to miss, but then another Knicks player tipped it in and they won with like a second on the clock, which was thrilling. Also Taylor Swift was courtside wearing a shirt that said “Stevie Knicks.”
World Cup kickoff
The biggest World Cup in history opened Thursday: 48 teams (up from 32), three host nations for the first time, final in New Jersey July 19.
If the U.S. and Iran each finish second in their groups, they’ll meet in Dallas on July 3 — the day before the country’s 250th birthday. This is the first World Cup in which a host nation is at war with a participant.
A Category 1 final ticket ran $10,990. That’s the best non-hospitality seat FIFA sells to the general public for the final. These seats are generally along the sidelines at midfield, roughly between the penalty areas, in the lower and mid bowls. For regular matches, locals could win lotteries for $60 seats, about two percent of inventory per match.
Macquarie projects more than $50 billion in global wagers — likely the biggest betting event in history, up from $35 billion in Qatar in 2022. The extra $15 billion: 16 more teams, and a U.S. where 65% of the population can now legally bet on sports, up from 40% four years ago.
Scotland’s Craig Gordon, 43, is the oldest player on the pitch and second-oldest in World Cup history. Mexico’s Gilberto Mora, 17, is too young to get a tattoo without a parent’s permission. And Spain’s Lamine Yamal, 18 — who debuted for Barcelona at 15 — arrives at his first World Cup already considered one of the best players alive.
As The Atlantic writes: “Every time America hosts international soccer, the world’s best players unite to complain about the fields” — Argentine keeper Emi Martínez called Atlanta’s 2024 Copa América surface “a trampoline” and “a disaster.” FIFA bans synthetic turf, but big American stadiums are built for the NFL, so groundskeepers grow sod on plastic tarps over two inches of sand, which forces roots sideways instead of down. This time the grass has been studded with plastic fibers every five millimeters by a machine resembling a Zamboni, under giant hot-pink Dutch grow lights.
Belfast riots
Anti-immigrant riots roiled Belfast Thursday after a knife attack Monday night left a man in his 40s with slash wounds to his face, back, and eyes — bystanders, one wielding a hurling stick, were credited with saving his life. Word spread on social media that the attacker was foreign-born; the suspect, a Sudanese national, was charged Tuesday with attempted murder. By Tuesday night, men in balaclavas were torching cars and homes in immigrant-heavy neighborhoods, shouting “foreigners out.” Two hundred backup officers from elsewhere in the U.K. arrived Thursday.
The Belfast riots are the latest upheaval in a prolonged crisis over race and immigration in Britain. Last June, Northern Ireland endured two weeks of anti-immigration rioting triggered by an alleged sexual assault in the town of Ballymena, which drove much of the town’s Roma population– once called gypsies– to flee.
More recently, violent protests erupted in May after a Sikh man was convicted of murdering an 18 year old student in December 2025.
The $100,000 Sticker
Sixteen colleges — Duke, Georgetown, NYU, and the University of Chicago among them — now post total annual costs above $100,000 for 2026-27, per Princeton Review data. Brown, Northwestern, and Pepperdine sit above $99,000. The buffer: at the six-figure schools, average need-based grants for first-years run $42,000 to $79,000.
68 Quadrillion Miles of Fungi
Pick up a handful of dirt and you’re holding a piece of the planet’s most extensive infrastructure — and you can’t see any of it. Beneath the surface runs a circulatory system of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi: networks that attach to plant roots and thread filaments through the soil, ferrying water and nutrients up to the plants and pulling carbon down out of the atmosphere.
A paper published Thursday in Science put a number on the network’s total length: 68 quadrillion miles, enough to reach the sun and back 730 million times. The filaments hold roughly 300 megatons of carbon — four to six times the carbon stored in every human being alive. A single teaspoon of soil can contain 32 feet of it.
You can’t see the threads because they’re microscopic. The filaments — called hyphae — run 2 to 20 micrometers wide; a human hair is about 70. These fungi grow no mushrooms, produce nothing aboveground, and spend their whole lives out of sight, some of it literally inside the cells of plant roots.
So how do you measure 68 quadrillion miles of something invisible? Researchers count and measure hyphae in tiny soil samples under a microscope — say, ten meters of thread in a gram of dirt. Then they pooled 16,000 such samples from hundreds of studies worldwide, building a library of fungal density across forests, grasslands, and deserts. They fed that to a machine-learning model along with the local conditions at each site — temperature, rainfall, soil pH, vegetation — and let it learn the pattern: this climate, plus this soil plus this plant life, yields roughly this much fungus. Then the model filled in everywhere nobody had dug.
The problem is what happens when we dig anyway. Wild grasslands hold an estimated 40 percent of this fungal biomass, most of it legally unprotected, and they’re being plowed into farmland at a fast clip. Tear up the grassland and you tear up the grid — and the carbon it was holding down.
Friday June 12
Iran
The peace deal exists mainly in the telling. President Trump said Friday it was “in pretty final shape.” Iran’s foreign ministry spokesman told the state broadcaster “nothing has been finalized.” As of midday, neither government had said publicly what the deal contains. But Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said a U.S.-Iran deal “has never been closer.” There was even talk of a signing ceremony as soon as Sunday (Trump’s 80th birthday) in Geneva ahead of next week’s G7 summit.
Israel ended the week as it began, striking southern Lebanon, where the fight with Hezbollah shows few signs of letting up.
SpaceX IPO
For every share SpaceX sold Friday, four buyers wanted it. The company set aside a fifth of the shares for ordinary people buying through brokerage accounts — an unusually big slice — and they put in $100 billion in orders, per Bloomberg. Big money managers like BlackRock and the investment funds of foreign governments took the rest.
The fight is over what the company is actually worth. At $135 a share, buyers are paying nearly $100 for every $1 SpaceX takes in each year — far more than is typical for rocket, satellite, or AI companies — and the company lost $4.3 billion in the first three months of this year. Skeptics point to Musk’s record of promising more than he delivers: he bought Twitter for $44 billion in 2022, its ad business shrank 65 percent last year, and he folded what was left into his AI company, which is now part of SpaceX.
The believers are betting on three things. First, Starlink — SpaceX’s network of thousands of small satellites flying low over the Earth, beaming internet down to anyone with a pizza-box antenna. No cables, no cell towers. That matters because most of the planet — ships, planes, war zones, farms, whole countries without fiber — still can’t get fast internet any other way, and so far nobody else has caught up.
Second, data centers in space. The computers that run AI are warehouses full of chips, and those warehouses are hitting a wall on Earth: they need staggering amounts of electricity and water to keep cool, and towns are starting to say no to them. In orbit, the sun shines all the time, solar panels work better than anywhere on the ground, and there are no neighbors. The bet is that SpaceX — the only company that can launch cheap and often — puts the warehouses up there.
Third, Musk’s AI models catch up to the leaders, Anthropic and OpenAI.
Musk ended Thursday worth $794.6 billion, per Forbes. If the stock climbs enough, he becomes the first trillionaire — about 110 years after a jump in Standard Oil stock made John D. Rockefeller America’s first billionaire. That made the front page on September 29, 1916.
Europe locks the doors
A decade of argument over migration became law across the European Union on Friday. The new pact — adopted in 2024 under pressure from far-right nationalist parties — brings stricter border controls, faster case processing, digital tracking of asylum applications, and more deportations.
The countries where migrants land — Greece, Italy, Spain, Cyprus — no longer carry the load alone. Every other member must either take a share of asylum seekers or pay €20,000 for each one it refuses; this year’s pool is 21,000 relocations or €420 million. Poland, Austria, Belgium, and Sweden say they will take no one. Poland continues to suspend the right to asylum altogether, citing Belarus weaponizing migration at its border. Hungary’s new prime minister, Péter Magyar, has kept his predecessor Viktor Orbán’s hard line, including a refusal to accept migrants.
The rules arrive as the pressure eases. Irregular arrivals fell 26 percent last year to their lowest level since 2021 — largely because Europe got tough before the law did, hardening its borders and paying transit countries like Turkey to stop the boats before they launch. The worry is the war. The Times reports EU and Turkish officials are already in back-channel talks about heading off a new refugee wave from Iran; Turkey is the buffer more than a million migrants crossed a decade ago. Officials remain scarred by the 2014–16 surge from Syria and Afghanistan — the wave that built the far right in Germany, Austria, and France before the walls went up. This time they are planning for the wave before it forms.
David Hockney
“I am no good at science but I can draw,” David Hockney wrote on one exam when he was younger. The painter died Thursday at his home in London. He was 88. His figurative, suavely colored pictures pulled attention back to people and places after decades when abstraction ruled.
He painted gay life while it was still a crime. We Two Boys Together Clinging, from 1961 and named for a Whitman poem, depicted that life with an openness Britain would not legalize until 1967.
Born in Bradford in 1937, one of five children in a tiny terrace house, he hid under the stairs clutching bibles during the bombing raids; wartime paper shortages confined his drawing to the kitchen floor and the hymn books at church.
According to the BBC: “In 1964 he flew to Los Angeles chasing the light and the bronzed bodies he’d seen in American magazines, and as the plane descended he saw hundreds of swimming pools glittering in the valleys below. Britain had only just come off rationing; in California a pool wasn’t a luxury, just a way of life. The pools became his great subject.
In a Bigger Splash, his best-known work, he painted the angular buildings and cloudless sky with a roller, then took a brush to make a disturbance in the water from a diver you never see.
Solar power up
For the first month on record, American solar made more electricity than coal. In May, solar supplied 12.8 percent of the country’s power. Coal supplied 12.2. Five years ago, coal supplied nearly 20 percent.
The crossover came despite a government campaign against it. Congress phased out the federal tax credits for solar and wind last July. The Interior Department then required that project decisions on federal land — approvals career staff used to handle — go through Secretary Doug Burgum’s office personally; more than 60 large projects stalled, per the Times. The courts have started pushing back: a federal judge in Boston blocked several of the policies in April, and on Monday another judge threw out a Treasury rule that made the subsidies harder to claim.
Solar grew anyway. May’s output was a record and ran 17 percent ahead of a year ago, with the summer peak — June and July, when solar does its best work — still ahead, per Ember, a clean-energy think tank. A second report this week, from the solar industry’s trade group and the analytics firm Wood Mackenzie, measured the pace another way: in the first three months of the year, the country added enough new solar to power roughly 1.3 million homes, and the six millionth individual system — rooftops on houses counted alongside desert arrays — came online. In 2025, a new solar project went up somewhere in America every 59 seconds. Ember’s data puts solar where coal used to live: the third-largest source of power in the country, behind natural gas and nuclear, and the fastest-growing.
